Subscribe To

Friday, September 6, 2013

[Obligatory aplogies for not posting in forever until, suddenly, an opportunity arises to plug one's own work.]Welcome, anyone who's stopping by after seeing my essay, My Best Stupid Decision on the fabulous new literary site, Full Grown People. If you haven't yet seen it, I hope you'll take a look at my piece, as well as the brilliant other essays on the site. Founder and editor Jennifer Niessein (who co-founded and, for many years, co-edited the wonderful Brain, Child) had the genius idea of publishing essays about adulthood. That's right, not essays for and about some specific Gen—not X, Y, nor any of the other letters in the alphabet that have been assigned to a Gen—nor Boomers nor Seniors nor the Greatest Generation nor the Lost Generation nor any of the cohorts that date back before the time when they would slap a label or letter on tens of millions of people and treat it like it's more scientific than astrology.Nope, Full Grown People is for grownups. Refreshing, huh? So please check it out, if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, here's a snippet of my essay, which is about my decision to recklessly take my almost-grown sons to Europe, even though any sane person could clearly see that I couldn't afford it.

My retirement savings are a fraction of what financial experts say you need —and that sum is more than twice what I will gross, at my current salary, over the next two decades. Retirement is a dot on the horizon, a distant posse in an old-fashioned Western, inexorably crossing Monument Valley as a silent cloud of dust kicked up by thundering hooves.

This was hardly the time to be jetting off around the globe.

Unless … unless it was exactly the time.

My older son would be leaving in the fall for a college across the country. The younger would be a senior in high school. They would soon move past the stage of their lives—so endless while it’s happening, so telescoped in retrospect—when taking a big trip with one’s mom is a culturally approved option.

... Already, I was too aware of the sound my footsteps made in an empty house.

Like the piece? I'd love to hear from you. Hate it? Think my decision was idiotic? Guess what—I’d love to hear from you, too! Like I always say, the internet is just way too nice.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

I’m not going to write a huge amount (UPDATE: I'm going to write more than 1,200 words, so actually that's quite a lot) about Ann Romneygate,
because every publication on earth has already covered it with not one but
multiple stories apiece. I’vecurrentlygot fiveon
my screenin
tabs. I’m already way oversaturated myself with what is essentially a minor kerfuffle, and not particularly eager to add to the
glut.

Still, this kerfuffle does center around one of my main issues: how caregiving work is categorized. I’d feel remiss not to address it at all. And I have
thoughts about both sides, albeit somewhat contradictory ones.

1.)I call it Ann Romneygate because Ann Romney, in this metaphor, is the hotel where the break-in
occurred, not the G. Gordon Liddy of the episode. Liddy, the
original Watergate scandal's villainous protagonist, would in this case be Hilary Rosen, a political professional who remarked that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life." Just as the
Watergate break-in could theoretically have occurred in any hotel (though
thankfully it didn’t, because “gate” is much catchier suffix for subsequent
scandals than “Holiday Inn Express”), this isn’t really about Ann
Romney per se. It’s about rich ladies who can afford to stay home with their
children without worrying in the least about the financial consequences (even, most likely, long term, in the case of divorce or widowhood), and who have the resources to hire out any or all child-care tasks,
as they choose.

2.)There’s no question that Hilary Rosen’s comment
was inaccurate. Of course Ann Romney has
worked a day in her life. Many days. Call me naive, but I'll bet that nobody on earth, no
matter how privileged or protected, reaches age 63 (as of Ann Romney's birthday on Monday) without doing any work
whatsoever, not just single but, cumulatively, multiple days’ worth. Let alone a mother of
five. Even if it’s just interviewing potential servants. So Rosen was wrong,
not to mention impolitic. Hey political professionals, rather than having to
pick apart every sentence before you utter it—and, when you fail to perform this
task successfully, having your offhand remarks become three-news-cycle blunders
and targets of national ridicule—wouldn’t it be easier just to stop making rude
remarks? Yes, even about people with whom you disagree politically?

3.)Sure, I’d like to have caregiving work recognized as, you know, work. So when someone dismissively calls it “not
work,” I am obliged to be miffed. People are constantly confusing “doing work
that doesn’t bring a paycheck” with “not doing work,” and I’ll take any
opportunity to point out that child care does, indeed, entail actual work. Not the hardest work in the world, I'm the first to admit, probably not even as hard most days as being president or running a company, but work nonetheless. You’d
think any parent could attest to this. Still, the myth endures.

4.)On the other hand, I’ve probably said something similar at some point. That’s because in everyday speech, “work” is convenient
shorthand for “work outside the home,” “work for pay,” etc. I can understand
how the verbal slip occurred. I see what Rosen said as less a damning revelation of
disrespect for all mothers than a minor faux-pas (or, at most, a damning revelation
of disrespect for Ann Romney).

5.)And let’s not even get into the situation
that inspired Rosen’s ill-considered comment in the first place. She was reacting to the news that Mitt, apparently, sends his wife out to find out what is on the minds of that mysterious special-interest group called “women.” Naturally, Mitt can be expected to understand only what regular voters—i.e.,
men—have on their minds. ... Where would I start with this?

6.)I resent Rosen, both Romneys, and the entire
mass media for turning this into yet another situation where people opine that
only the most privileged women can “afford” to stay home, anyway. Media proessionals are forever indignantly asserting that this is a choice available only to women occupying a narrow stratospheric strata of the socioeconomic tier. First of all, Census
studies show that stay-at-home mothers as a group are actually poorer and less
well educated than mothers as a whole (many of them, of course, may not have
made deliberate choices to opt out of the workforce, but they are working at home). More to the point, I know
plenty of stay-at-home mothers of the middle class, women who choose to be with
their children even though they have to pinch
pennies to do it but also, at the same time, even though they would qualify for good jobs if so chose. You’d think such women were invisible, yet not so far in the past they used to be known to the media and referred to (albeit patronizingly and one-dimensionally) as soccer moms.

7.)I’m a Democrat. But I’m pretty sure I’d say the
same thing if the parties were reversed.

8.)All that said, it’s important to note that the
experiences of a stay-at-home mother who possesses, for all practical purposes,
unlimited financial resources are inevitably going to be drastically different from
those of a stay-at-home mother who can’t afford to hire out work. To pretend that insulting Ann
Romney in a work-related way is the equivalent of insulting all mothers at every income
level in the exact same way is disingenuous in the extreme. Sure, even if you’re Ann Romney, you
still have to figure out how to balance a busy schedule (which Ann Romney undoubtedly
has) and time with your children, which can be a struggle, emotionally and practically, at any level of wealth.
But what you’re not doing, if you’re Ann Romney, or what at least you would not have to do, is the labor that typically comprises at least of half caregiving work. The drudgery. You’re not wiping the spilled mac ’n’
cheese off the floor with a paper towel. You’re not dashing to the basement to
throw in a load of laundry at naptime. You’re not running to the supermarket midweek
because you’re out of milk and lunch meat, taking the kids with you because
there’s no one else to watch them, plunking them in one of those giant
fire-engine carts and hoping like hell that the plastic emergency-vehicle inexact replication
will keep them entertained long enough for you to grab those items before they
start hitting each other or creating chaos in the checkout line. If you’re Ann
Romney, you don’t do any of those things. Or I would guess you don’t, anyway—remember,
we’re really talking generic rich lady here, as I have no idea what Ann Romney’s
actual day-to-day life is like; for all I know she loves pushing a wire cart full
of squabbling toddlers through a crowd of frowning onlookers, so always insists
on taking care of those midweek runs herself. My point is, she doesn’t have to do those things—or anything else—if
she doesn’t want to.

9.)I debated No. 8 pretty intensely with a friend. For
what it’s worth, my friend does not have children. Her income, she says, is
just the amount she would pick if she could have her pick of incomes (though
this, as an addendum to saying she would not want to be super-rich). My friend argued
that it’s not as easy to hire servants as I might think. And that there no
longer exists a Downton Abbey-style servant class from which to hire. My counterarguments were a) Oh,
boo hoo b) I admittedly don’t know that much about life in the Romnesphere, but
I bet that, given 8 percent unemployment, it’s not impossible to find qualified
people who are willing to hang out in a luxurious mansion all day doing easy-ish
tasks for what must be at least semi-decent pay (because at some point their
salaries will probably come under scrutiny). Heck, I know ordinary upper-middle-class
people in Minneapolis—affluent, but still within the 99 percent—whose lives are
made easier by nannies and the like. Notice I say easier. Probably rarely downright
easy.

10.)My friend pointed out that Ann Romney has health problems, which make everything harder. No argument here—I’d take almost
anything, including poverty, over poor health. Still, according to
Wikipedia, Ann Romney’s MS does not much limit her lifestyle, and she’s been
cancer-free since a lumpectomy in 2008.

I clicked on the link to Think Progress, ready to start fuming over the latest Republican anti-woman idiocy. And sure enough, here was news that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had repealed the state’s equal pay law. Yep, plenty to be enraged about.

But what about that ridiculously stupid quote by the faintly Gingrichy looking state Sen. Glenn Grothman? I initially assumed he was referring to the antiquated idea that men need money more "because they have families to support." Instead, Grothman declared that the existing wage gap results from women prioritizing childrearing over breadwinning.

“Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”

Now this is truly horrifying. Really, deeply horrifying. But it's not because Grothman’s quote is so idiotic.

It's because I agree with him.

I rarely find myself siding with a Republican these days about anything, especially regarding women. Especially a Wisconsin legislator, one who would dismiss a wage-gap study by calling the nonpartisan American Association of University Women "a pretty liberal group.” I’m nodding along with thisguy? Just kill me now.

Oh, I don’t totally concur with Grothman—in the Daily Beast story that Think Progress quoted, Grothman said, “What you’ve got to look at, and Ann Coulter has looked at this, is you have to break it down by married and unmarried. … (then) the differential disappears.” Oh god, please tell me I’m not agreeing with anything Ann Coulter ever said.

Luckily, no. Grothman and, presumably, Coulter are both wrong. The AAUW study found that even after controlling for marital status, hours worked, number of children and all kinds of other factors, there was still an unexplained 5-percent difference in the earnings of male and female graduates one year after graduation, and an unexplained 12-percent gap after 10 years in the workforce.

But let’s face it. That’s not the full wage gap (which is 23 percent). And Grothman’s quote about the lawyer couple is, unfortunately, supported by simple logic. If a woman drops out of the workforce while her husband keeps making money—earning raises, getting promoted—then down the line, when she eventually returns to work, there’s a good chance she’ll be earning less than he does. And in some way that gap, as Grothman says, resulted from “a different sense of urgency in each person.”

What that doesn’t explain is where the “sense of urgency” comes from.

As a group, women unquestionably dospend less time working—for pay, it's important to stress—than men do. Stay-at-home mothers outnumber stay-at-home fathers more than 30 to one. Research by economist Karine Moe and anthropologist Dianna Shandy, both of Macalester College, showed that even when mothers don’t drop out of the paid workforce entirely, they often sacrifice earnings on behalf of their children: they work part time, go into lower-paying careers with flexible hours, waive promotions to more time-consuming jobs.

Meanwhile, even as we liberal, progressive, feminist women get all up in arms over Grothman’s ill-informed sexism, we (some of us, anyway) are applauding a French feminist intellectual for saying essentially the same thing.

French feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter

In her new book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (a best-seller in Europe) Elisabeth Badinter argues that today's mothers sacrifice careers and self-fulfillment for unnecessarily time-intensive nurturing involving lengthy breastfeeding, attachment parenting, providing children with nearly constant availability and attention.

I haven’t read TheConflict, though judging by what I have read about it, including a New Yorker profile of Badinter, I probably wouldn't agree with every single thing she says. But overall, Badinter makes a good point. And she’s addressing the kind of mothers who typically wouldn’t be caught dead agreeing with right-wing Republican senators.

“The problem," Marcotte writes,"is that said choices are usually made on pain of being considered bad, unnatural mothers if you opt out of them and choose to keep a bit of your life and body for yourself."

Now, Grothman and Badinter disagree about one really important thing. Grothman implies that this decision comes from within; he seems to feel we females are naturally hardwired to care less about money than mothering. Badinter blames mothers’ behavior on parenting trends and external pressures. Grothman may be partly right—it's possibe women are somewhat more inclined that way by evolution and biology—but the impulse can’t all be innate, or how do you explain our spending more time with our kids than our mothers and grandmothers did?

As the pressure builds, it stands to reason, women will want to cut back on paid work, or give it up entirely. Sure enough, a 2007 Pew Research study found that only 21 percent of working mothers want full-time jobs—down from 10 years earlier, when 32 percent liked the idea of working full time. Preference for part-time work was up over that same period, from 48 percent to 60 percent. (And this is no grass-is-greener situation: stay-at-home mothers became less interested over that decade in working outside the home, full or part-time.) Among men, meanwhile, a solid 72 percent say full-time work is ideal.

It's undeniable that women, as both Grothman and Badinter say, feel more compelled than men to sacrifice pay for time with their children. The reasons are complex, multifaceted and, I suspect, involve a mix of internal and external motivators. They deserve much further study. There simply isn’t enough honest public discussion about this stuff.

Wait—what? Don’t we talk about this stuff pretty much constantly? After all, the so-called “mommy wars” (the supposed battles between working and at-home mothers) certainly get their share of media coverage. So does “helicopter parenting,” the idea that today's parents spend too much time controlling every moment of their kids’ lives. But both of these discussions typically center on how these choices might affect the child, not the parent (in the latter case, children are perceived to be warped by too much coddling, but the effect on mothers' lives and livelihoods is generally not part of the discussion).

These media obsessions distract from other real, pressing issues: like whether children really are such delicate flowers that they require (or are harmed by!) constant parental attention; how much financial security mothers should be expected to sacrifice to provide it; why it’s mostly mothers, not fathers, who make such sacrifices; and why as a culture we encourage women to make them without fully connecting their “choice” to its potential results, including women’s far greater likelihood than men to live in poverty.

Bashing Republicans is fun and usually warranted. But in this case a bumbling Wisconsin right-wing state lawmaker and an esteemed French feminist intellectual are at least somewhere on the same page. And their point is worth closer examination.

If by any chance you're reading this AND you're at AWP, please stop by. If you're not here in Chicago, it's not too late to hop on a plane!

Sorry, kidding, it probably is too late, especially if there's traffic on the way to the airport and the security check-in line is as long as it was for me on Wednesday and you're flying from any farther than, say, Rockford, Ill.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Remnick, who is editor of the magazine, was reviewing Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, but the remark in question had little directly to do with the
First Couple. Here is the significant paragraph (emphasis added on the disturbing
part):

In
some respects, the Obamas resemble a post-sixties version of the Clintons. They
are graduates of some of the richest institutions in the country. In Hyde Park,
they lived among other highly educated, liberal, earnestly well-meaning, and
self-regarding people, with all the requisite
concerns about “family-career balance,” “doing good and doing well.” They
lived with the small hypocrisies and pleasures of their milieu, bringing
together some hyper-wealthy friends and unabashedly progressive causes. It is a
liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.

By “family-career
balance,” Remnick apparently means what’s more commonly called “work-family
balance” or “work-life balance”—that is, management of the competing demands of
jobs and childcare. Since those responsibilities sometimes conflict to the point
of being mutually prohibitive, work-family balance is indeed a requisite
concern for many people. Especially for women, who tend to shoulder a greater
portion of the “family” part of the equation and sacrifice economically because
of it, but also for men, who often feel more pressure to prioritize work and consequently
miss out on time with their kids (both of which scenarios probably apply to the
Obamas, come to think of it).

But look how Remnick presents
the term, framed with scare quotes amid wry phrases like “earnestly
well-meaning, and self-regarding” and “small hypocrisies and pleasures.” Requisite,
of course, literally means necessary. But Remnick is suggesting that in this
case the necessity isn’t quite real, that the concerns are a puffed-up product
of class expectations. He implies that “family-career balance” is a fashionable
issue over which the privileged and progressive may furrow their brows as a
matter of propriety, not a really source of serious tension in their glamorous lives.

As if figuring out
how to both do your job and raise your kids were a task on the order of, oh, selecting
an artisanal cheese.

Esther Fein and David Remnick

Remnick isn’t being mean-spirited; his précis is only lightly
sardonic, not to mention otherwise spot-on. (Don’t you just know people like
that, even if those in your orbit rank somewhere below the Obamas? Heck, I’ve had
neighbors whom this describes to a T except for the “hyper-wealthy” part.) He pokes
friendly fun at those people—and, implicitly, at himself. The New Yorker is politically liberal, arguably
the country’s most esteemed periodical, and famously well-paying. As editor, Remnick
occupies the same sort of glittering, left-leaning environment he gently mocks.

He is also a husband (to New York Times reporter Esther Fein), and
father of three children.

Who knows how the Remnick-Fein household handles its child-caring
duties. Maybe for whatever reason the matter has never posed much of a problem,
despite the parents’ demanding careers. A 2006 profile
of Remnick in the Guardian (back when
his sons were teenagers and his daughter seven) depicts his family stuff as ordinary
but remarkably stress-free: “He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons
and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these
things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time
with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to
Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'”

Well sir, many of them struggle with work-family balance,
even if they’re financially successful. Or so I assume, anyway. Because, sure, wealthy people can afford great
childcare, but many also work long hours and travel for business, and even wealthy
parents want to spend time with their children.

But the rich are hardly the only ones facing the problem. If
juggling work and children is tough for the 1 percent, imagine how it is for people
who have not “careers” but plain old jobs, people who can’t afford great childcare and for whom staying home with a sick kid
might mean not only forfeiting a day’s pay but possibly getting fired.

Remnick is aware of all this, of course. But maybe it doesn’t
all click together; I suspect he doesn’t connect “family-career balance” to the
shortcomings in our system—problems with family leave, daycare, job
flexibility, health care and so on—that can lead to genuine desperation,
financial sacrifice and, in some families, economic disaster. His use of “career”
rather than “work,” together with his light-handed tone, suggest he is
imagining hyper-responsible parents checking off quality time with little Abigail
and Aiden between conferences and fundraisers, just another aspect of the “liberal
aesthetic raised to a style of life.” After all, it was under Remnick’s
editorship that, in a 2004
New Yorker review of books describing this dilemma, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, “Choosing
between work and home is, in the end, a problem only for those who have a
choice. In this sense, it is, like so many ‘problems’ of twenty-first-century
life, a problem of not having enough problems.”

Maybe I'm making too much of Remnick’s offhand phrase in
a piece that’s mostly about something else.

But I can't help thinking that if even the brilliant editor of one of the country’s most
influential publications doesn’t fully understand why work-family balance is a
serious issue for a lot of people at every socioeconomic level, then those of
us for whom it’s an honest-to-God requisite concern have an long way to go.

Friday, December 2, 2011

You never have to look far to find flagrant violations of
the “Correlation
does not imply causation” law. They abound in newspapers, magazines, TV
programs, parenting and diet books—anywhere, basically, that covers topics like
parenting or fitness, and thus relies heavily on behavioral research. In the past month, you could find examples of the problem, among other places, on
the website of the country’s leading popular psychology monthly, in a piece by the
triple-Pulitzer-winning New York Times
columnist, and in a psychologist’s column on Huffington Post.

As many of you may
recall from your old science and psychology courses (or from a Brain, Child piece I wrote last year),
just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other. For example, if there’s a
correlation between A and B—more of A tends to go hand in hand with more of B—that’s
no proof that A caused B. It might
have. Or maybe B caused A, or some combination of the two, or a third factor, C, caused both.

In a Psychology Today
blog post titled “Parents:
Your Words Matter,” University of Chicago psychology professor Sian
Beilock writes about a correlation between the way parents talk
to their preschool children and the children’s later problem-solving skills. Researcher Susan Levine, Beilock reports, found that the
more parents talked about spatial characteristics of objects—using words like “big,
tall, circle, curvy, edge”—the better the child performs, years later, on spatial problems.

“What Dr. Levine and her colleagues found was that
children's spatial abilities are in, large part, driven by what their parents
say,” Beilock writes.

If that’s what Dr. Levine and her colleagues really found,
there’s no evidence of it in Beilock’s post, nor in the abstract
of Levine’s article in Developmental Science. Based on what they present, it could just as easily go the
other way around.

Now, I’m not going to argue that parents words don’t matter (though in research I’ve
conducted in my own household, I found little correlation between parental instructions
to take one’s dirty dishes into the kitchen and the likelihood that one’s dirty
dishes will actually be taken into the kitchen). It may seem
logical that a child who’s always hearing her parents talk about objects' sizes and shapes
might be more attuned to those qualities and, thus, better at solving problems involving
those concepts.

That might make intuitive sense, but intuition isn’t proof—another lesson from those college psychology
courses. Besides, it’s just as intuitively logical that parents who are good at
spatial problems are more likely to perceive the world in spatial terms and (unconsciously,
perhaps) pepper their language with spatial words. And that their children tend
to inherit those skills and later prove, unsurprisingly, to be good at spatial stuff,
too.

One big moral of this story is that simple correlations
between parental actions and children’s behavior rarely proves cause and effect
if the parents and children are biologically related. In most stuations, it’s
too difficult to rule out the possibility that genes, rather than parenting, are the cause.

Thomas Friedman forgets that, too. He
writes about a study in which 15-year-olds whose parents read to them when
they were little scored higher on a test than kids whose parents didn’t. From this, Friedman
concludes:

We need better
parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a
huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Spot the correlation/causation error here? Again, it's a problem of ignoring possible genetic influence. What kind of parents read books to their kids?
Probably those who like to read themselves. What kind of people like to read? Usually
people who are good at reading. What kind of parents involve themselves in their
child’s education? Most likely parents who did well in school themselves.

So it’s no big leap to imagine that children who are read to also inherited their parents' reading skills and academic achievement. Yet neither Friedman nor the researchers seem to have considered that possibility. But hey, even if their conclusion were 100 percent scientifically sound, they still would hardly justify this comment, quoted by Friedman,
from the guy who oversees the testing:

[J]ust asking your
child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning
that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring.

First, judging from the monosyllabic grunts I usually get in answer to that question, it seems doubtful. Anyway, how would he know this? I’m going to step out on a limb and guess that there
probably aren't many parents alive who purchase “hours of private tutoring”
for their children yet don't bother to ask how school is going. So who would be the control group here?

A message to night
owls: There's news that your bedtime -- and those late-night snacks --
may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds.

Again, it’s not hard to think of another explanation for this correlation: That people
who like to stay up late are often also people who like to eat a lot. As a
card-carrying member of both groups, I can vouch for this. But Breus, a.k.a. “The
Sleep Doctor,” doesn’t even consider that possibility. Wonder
if this could have anything to do with the topic of his recent book, The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan: Lose Weight
through Better Sleep.

Even if those writers and researchers are leaping to
conclusions, you might ask, where’s the harm? Why wouldn't you want to ask about your kid's
school day, whether it got him better test scores or not? (Do you
ask about your partner's work day, even if you don't think it will get him or her a raise?) Besides, if there’s any chance, however slight, that it
would improve their school performance, why not go for it? Asking the question is pretty easy.

The spatial language situation is a bit more difficult. You might
be willing to stop and think about every word you say to your child and deliberately insert spatial terms into the mix. (Although what if by doing that you’re
squelching some other form of communication that might be equally important? I
used to play word games with my then-preschool kids. On the day when I asked one to name the opposite of “short” and he came back with both “long” and “tall,” I knew he would
be good in language classes, and voila, he is. Yet I can't say his
language skills are the result of playing word games; very likely, he and I both liked
playing word games because we’re both good at language.)

But the most damaging result of all of this
misinterpretation and misinformation is guilt. It's the guilt you might feel if you take Friedman seriously when he proclaims, “We need better
parents.”

Don’t most of us—at least, those of us who comprise the audience for
these articles, i.e., people interested in figuring out how to be better parents—already
do plenty of fretting about what we’re doing wrong? Must we really be told, once again,
that we’re never good enough?

About Me

I am a freelance journalist, essayist, book critic, mother of two teenagers, companion of a Jack Russell terrier.
See more about me, and samples of my work, at www.katyread.com. Contact me katy@katyread.com. Tweet me http://twitter.com/Katy_Read.